Political Register

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Political Register was a British weekly political newspaper founded in 1802 by the English writer and radical right-wing conservative politician William Cobbett (1763-1835). The newspaper existed until his death in 1835 when it was discontinued.

With the start-up capital from his friend and influential politician William Windham (1750-1810) Cobbett started his newspaper. In the beginning, Cobbett supported the Tories , the predecessor of the Conservative Party, with the newspaper . Annoyed by Prime Minister William Pitt (1759-1806), whom he assigned to the Tories, Cobbett finally withdrew the Tories' support and became increasingly right-wing and radical with his paper.

In 1815 the British government raised the newspaper tax to four pence per copy in an attempt to deliberately prevent people on lower incomes from reading a newspaper. Cobbett reacted to this with his own kind. In 1816 he addressed the working class with his paper , reduced the price per issue from ten pence to two pence, now published his newspaper as a pamphlet , thereby avoiding the tax and increasing the circulation to over in just a few weeks 40,000 copies. Since the sheet was also passed on for reading, the actual daily readership was much larger. With Cobbett's advocacy of workers' concerns, the Political Register became the mouthpiece of the working class and interested middle class.

How much his newspaper stood out from the established newspapers is shown by a quote from Karl Marx / Friedrich Engels - Werke - (Marx to the London Times and Lord Palmerston) : “You only have to open Cobbett's Political Register to convince yourself that since Beginning of this century the major London newspapers continually play the role of advocates for the highest-born leaders of English foreign policy. "

The Political Register was Cobbett and Cobbett was the Political Register, it was impossible to separate the two. Cobbett used the sheet for his own purposes like no other. He led political campaigns about it, supported people, parties or directions and used it for his radical ideas, which he packaged in strong language and transported to the world via the paper. He was convicted once for one of his articles and was sent to the notorious Newgate Prison for 2 years .

The Political Register, like Cobbett himself, was valued by some and hated by others. But the copious citations of its time show that the Political Register received general attention.

Cobbett's last article appeared in the Political Register on June 13, 1835. Five days later, with his death, the paper was also discontinued.

literature

  • Margaret Cole : Makers of the Labor Movement . Longmans, Green and Co. , London 1948 (English).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Klaus Tenfelde, Walther Müller-Jentsch, From "Popular Radicalism" to "Working-Class Experience"? Chartism as a social movement , Ruhr University Bochum, Faculty of History, SS 2000.
  2. ^ Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels : Marx Engels works . 4th edition. tape  15 . Karl Diez Verlag , Berlin 1972, p. 318–323 (unchanged reprint of the 1st edition 1961).